🚨 Empire's Oops Moment: Yemen Plans Leaked in Text Mishap

Explore the unprecedented leak of classified U.S. war plans through a Signal text group, uncovering the carelessness and human cost of modern empire in Yemen.

Mar 25, 2025

😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾

In a big mistake, important people in the U.S. 🇺🇸 accidentally added a journalist 📰 to a secret chat 💬 where they were talking about a military plan to attack a place called Yemen 🇾🇪. They ended up sharing secret details 🔍 in texts, which is the way we send messages 📱 to friends and family. This mistake led to attacks 💥 where many people, some of whom were just like us with families 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 and dreams 🌟, sadly died 😢. It shows that even strong countries can mess up big, important things like keeping secrets 🔐, using the same technology we use to chat with friends.

🗝️ Takeaways

📉 Casual War Planning: The U.S. military's plans were discussed in a group text, leading to a massive security breach.
🏴‍☠️ The Leak's Aftermath: Sensitive strike details on Yemen, including targets and weapons, were exposed.
💀 Human Impact: Resulting airstrikes killed at least 53 people, highlighting the real human cost.
⚔️ Empire's Carelessness: This incident shows the conflicting nature of a massive military power managing basic security.
🛡️ Technology Misuse: Tools made for secure activist communications were used for war planning but leaked due to incompetence.
🤝 Resistance and Solidarity: Communities globally continue to resist these violent acts and promote justice.

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When Empires Text Their War Plans: The Yemen Signal Leak and What It Reveals About American Power

Hay más tiempo que vida, pero hay más guerra que tiempo.

Here on the borderlands, where military helicopters regularly slice through our skies and surveillance towers monitor our movements, news of the latest imperial blunder feels both shocking and entirely predictable.

The recent leak of classified U.S. military strike plans against Yemen's Houthi rebels through a Signal chat group represents everything wrong with how Empire operates in the digital age: careless, casual, and catastrophically violent.

What Happened: The Signal Leak Breakdown

On March 15, top Trump administration officials accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat group that was actively discussing classified military strike plans against Yemen. This monumental security breach revealed sensitive operational details just hours before bombs began falling on Yemeni soil.

The leaked information included:

Specific targets: Houthi military positions, command centers, and weapons depots marked for destruction
Weapons details: Plans to deploy "precision-guided munitions"
Attack timing and sequencing: Details of when and how strikes would unfold
Post-attack communications: Officials later shared celebratory messages, complete with emojis, as reports of casualties emerged

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior administration officials have since confirmed the authenticity of these leaked messages, while President Trump claimed ignorance during a press conference. Meanwhile, the National Security Council is investigating how Goldberg gained access.

Y mientras el imperio juega con sus teléfonos, la gente muere.

The airstrikes killed at least 53 people, including civilians. Let that sink in: real human beings with families, hopes, and dreams—gone because officials couldn't properly manage a messaging app.

Imperial Incompetence Meets Colonial Violence

This leak exposes the casual indifference with which the American empire conducts its business of war. Signal—a messaging app originally created for secure, private communications among activists and journalists facing repressive regimes—has become the platform where U.S. officials casually plan death from above while accidentally adding journalists to the conversation.

The contradictions pile up like bodies:

They claim to be the world's greatest military power but can't manage basic operational security.
They lecture the world about cybersecurity while leaking war plans through a messaging app.
They celebrate with emojis as communities are shattered by explosions.

From our perspective in the borderlands, where Indigenous communities have faced 500+ years of colonial violence, this is just the latest chapter in an old story.

The same colonial mindset that drew arbitrary lines through our ancestral territories now draws targeting maps over Yemen.

Understanding Yemen: Context That Gets Erased

Yemen's suffering isn't new, and it isn't simple. Since 2014, the country has been devastated by a multi-sided civil war that evolved into a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Houthi rebels, officially known as Ansar Allah, have controlled much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sana'a.

In recent months, Houthi forces have attacked shipping in the Red Sea, claiming solidarity with Palestinians during Israel's military campaign in Gaza. The Trump administration's strikes were allegedly aimed at degrading the Houthis' ability to threaten maritime traffic.

But beneath these geopolitical chess moves lies a humanitarian catastrophe:

Yemen remains one of the world's worst humanitarian crises
Millions face severe food insecurity
Medical infrastructure has collapsed
Children are dying of preventable diseases

The casual way U.S. officials discussed raining down more violence on this already devastated country reveals how completely dehumanized Yemeni life has become in the calculus of American power.

Signal as Symbol: Secure For Whom?

There's bitter irony in how Signal—created to protect vulnerable communities from surveillance—has become a tool where imperial powers plan their violence. Many of us in movement spaces adopted Signal early, seeking protection from the surveillance that indigenous, Black, and Brown organizers routinely face. Now, we watch as the powerful use these same tools to organize their wars, only to compromise them through sheer incompetence.

The incident demonstrates how technologies designed for protection are inevitably co-opted by the powerful. The military and intelligence community adopted the very tools built to resist their surveillance—only to leak their war plans through them.

Mira qué pendejada tan grande. Ni siquiera pueden usar bien las herramientas que robaron.

The Weaponization of Digital Space

What this leak also reveals is how normalized war planning has become. What does it say about our empire that officials can casually discuss bombing targets between meetings, via text message, with the same platforms we use to coordinate dinner plans or share family photos?

The bureaucratization of violence happens through these everyday technologies, making death dealing as routine as ordering takeout. The Signal leak pulls back the curtain on how the machinery of war operates today: not in dramatic war rooms with maps and generals, but in the back-and-forth of messaging apps, complete with emojis and casual banter.

For communities in the borderlands who have watched technologies of surveillance and control multiply—from Border Patrol surveillance towers to facial recognition at checkpoints—this latest example of technological imperialism feels grimly familiar.

Security Theater in an Age of Digital Empire

The officials involved will likely face consequences for this breach. There will be investigations, stern statements about "reviewing security protocols," perhaps even resignations.

But the deeper problem will remain: these are the same officials who implement massive surveillance against ordinary citizens, immigrants, and indigenous communities while failing to maintain basic security in their own communications.

The state demands monitoring of our communications while exposing its most sensitive plans through basic errors. It demands perfect compliance from immigrants and asylum seekers while demonstrating utter incompetence in its own affairs. It surveils water protectors and land defenders as "security threats" while leaking actual military plans to journalists by accident.

This is the theater of security: aggressive control of the vulnerable alongside careless handling of genuine state secrets.

The Human Cost: Beyond the Headlines

While media coverage fixates on the embarrassing security breach, we must remember the real consequences. The strikes that followed this leaked conversation killed at least 53 people, including civilians.

Each of those deaths represents a complete universe extinguished—families shattered, communities broken, futures erased. The celebratory messages exchanged after the strikes, with their grotesque emojis, reveal how completely detached officials have become from the human consequences of their actions.

For Indigenous communities who have experienced centuries of colonial violence, this detachment is painfully familiar. It's the same mentality that allows for "collateral damage" calculations, reduces human beings to abstract threat assessments, and considers some lives expendable in service to empire.

What This Means For All Of Us

You might be wondering why this matters to you, reading this from wherever you are. Here's why:

It exposes how war decisions are made: Casually, carelessly, without adequate safeguards, by unelected officials.
It reveals technological hubris: The same government that demands backdoors into encrypted communications can't manage its own operational security.
It shows contempt for human life: The casual planning and celebration of violence against a population already suffering immensely.
It demonstrates imperial continuity: Despite changing administrations, the machinery of American empire grinds on, killing from a distance.
It connects to domestic surveillance: The same state apparatus that plans wars abroad maintains intensive surveillance on communities at home, especially indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities.

The Signal leak provides a rare window into how empire actually functions—not through grand strategy but through banal, everyday communications, bureaucracy, casual violence, and indifference to suffering.

Finding Hope in Resistance

Despite the grim reality this leak exposes, communities continue to resist. From Yemen to Palestine to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, people fight for their dignity, their sovereignty, and their future.

Indigenous communities continue to defend land and water against extractive industries and military occupation. Immigrant communities build mutual aid networks in defiance of border militarization. Peace activists demand accountability for endless wars conducted in our names.

Our resistance isn't just about opposing specific policies—it's about creating alternatives to the logic of empire itself. It's about remembering and honoring our relationships to each other and to the land, about refusing the dehumanization that makes casual violence possible.

La lucha sigue, y seguirá mientras haya imperio.

What You Can Do

Stay informed about Yemen: Follow journalists and organizations that center Yemeni voices and experiences.
Support organizations: Donate to humanitarian organizations working in Yemen and to those supporting Yemeni refugees.
Contact representatives: Demand congressional oversight of military operations and an end to U.S. support for violence in Yemen.
Join local organizing: Connect with anti-war, indigenous solidarity, and immigrant rights organizations in your community.
Practice digital solidarity: Support organizations working on digital security for vulnerable communities, not just the powerful.
Share this knowledge: Break the silence about Yemen and about how imperial violence operates.

Remember that our struggles are connected. The same systems bombing Yemen are surveilling water protectors at Standing Rock, separating families at the border, and maintaining the colonial status quo in Puerto Rico. Our resistance must be equally connected.

En la lucha, encontramos la esperanza. En la comunidad, encontramos la fuerza.

What do you think about this latest example of imperial incompetence? How are you connecting struggles for peace abroad with justice at home? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.